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Well, in my opinion, it makes total sense if you consider the beginning of the Christian (Catholic) church. What better way to get people to subscribe to your faith and display an obedience than to tell them that we are all inherently sinners thanks to Adam and Eve. We are all instantly destined for eternal torment....but wait... We have the cure. If you believe in Jesus and so on and so forth he can cleanse you and you can live in eternal joy if you just accept what we are selling. The idea comes from the early church's power hungry days and has carried forth to today. At least from my understanding

I remember learning in one of my lit classes that a long time ago (I wish I could remember an exact time period), some believed that sex was a sin, and therefore all babies were born sinful because they were created through sin (sex).

The problem is we are all born in the flesh. We are all born human. The question that we have is whether we see being human as a state to be desired. If you say being human is an undesirable state, then you accept the doctrine of being 'born in sin' and needing of redemption. Are we born defective or are we born human?

I believe we are born human and that there is nothing wrong with being a human. I believe there is nothing wrong with us, that we are in no way in need of an upgrade...a Human 2.0 program. We aren't a born in a Beta mode. We are born as we are and as we should be. The issue is shall we accept our humanity or shall we reject it?

If we reject our humanity we are setting ourselves up for a life of constant struggle. We are saying there is something wrong with the way we are, something that needs correcting before we can be "the way we ought to be."

After years of struggling with the idea that there is something wrong with me that needs fixing I have come to the conclusion that the only thing wrong is that I refuse to accept who I am. But why do I feel myself inferior? Why do I think that I am somehow not who I should be? There is no reason, no objective standard by which I fall short. I am what I am.

I am not an atheist. That is a philosophical position that needs defending. I see myself as a Secular Mortalist. That is to say, I am a person who accepts his own mortality...that, as a human being, I have a fixed life expectancy that may be improved upon, extended by scientific methods...but that still is a fixed and absolute measure of my lifespan.

To be a human is to accept your mortality.

This knowledge that we will one day cease to exist is what defines us a human.

We are not imperfect because who we are defines the parameters of our potential perfection. We are not born in sin we are simply born as human. Whether you accept this fact or try to find a way to be somehow more than human is a matter of vanity.

We want to distinguish ourselves from the lower classes, those people who are not as human as we are. So we think of ourselves as born in need of perfection so we can claim we have achieved that perfection and are superior to the low lives who have not.

All religion is about being able to judge other people. We want to believe we are superior, so we create fantasies that support this desire.

The truth is simple. We are human. We are mortal. We will one day die and cease to exist. We are the same as the poorest of humans. We are the same as those we declare to be evil. We are all Hitlers.

I'd be interested to hear the rationalization for 'we are created in God's image, his perfect creation (since surely God can't create anything 'imperfect') and yet we're also supposedly 'sinners'. There's always free-will, but it seems to me that a perfect creation, even with free-will and the ability to choose to do bad things, simply wouldn't do bad things, or we wouldn't be perfect. This is only compounded by the idea that Adam, with no knowledge of good or bad, can't be held accountable for doing something he didn't know was bad.

"I am not an atheist. That is a philosophical position that needs defending."

Phillip, I don't label myself as an atheist either, the word atheist doesn't include a philosophical position. The word is defined simply as not a theist and the basic word can be used to partially describe me since I am not a theist.

Is in not fair to also describe a Secular Mortalist as also not a theist and therefore an atheist?

The Christian premise is that all ills on earth including death are empowered by sin. But sin gets its power from the law. Prior to the law allegedly, God just winked at mens sins. But the law was manifested to capture all men under sin so that there would be only one way to salvation, that is by belief upon his son who laid down his life as a sacrifice to save all that believe upon his name ( this goes beyond the phonic pronouncement, but in the middle east, it was understood that a gods name was a living entity in itself.)

Moreover, allegedly, strong spirits of delusion have been sent to the earth so that men would believe the lie rather than the truth and both men and woman would start lusting after each other rather than the opposite sex, to make sin exceedingly wicked so that on that day no man can boast in their own righteous, save the righteousness that is imputed through believe upon the savior of the world. .